Wind Energy Is Extraordinarily Expensive And Inefficient

At last someone talks sense but will the politicians listen? I doubt it
kayelsea

Just what I said three years ago. Wind will be a huge mistake with lasting environmental consequences. Another “good” idea that does incredible damage until people wake up.

Maybe this will help them stop the wind farm scheduled for Long Island sound. Teddy Kennedy would be happy. The people in Nantuckette don’t want it either. Not in their backyard policy @ work in the North East. How hypocritical of those N.E. liberals though.

Just get Al Gore and switch steam engine–Gore has enough hot air to power the entire earth for centuries.

Drakvag:
Nice try, but you inadvertently proved the point of the article. First, define “expensive”. Are you counting how much money it takes to build and maintain the turbines which is covered by the government? In Sweden, does “paid by taxes” mean “free” like it does in the US? Important thing to know. Second, you are already using a renewable energy–we call it hydro. We don’t call it renewable here in the states because we can’t get government subsidies for it like we can for wind and solar. So your necessary backup for wind power is already a renewable. I suppose you really don’t understand that you just paid for two types of renewable power instead of one since you never actually see what it costs. So the wind covers when the water runs out??? If not, you are indeed buying two sources of energy where one was fine. Lastly, your assumption that people who oppose wind are all for coal and gas power is completely wrong and shows how little understanding you have of this issue. Opponents of wind do not believe there are no alternatives to gas and oil, only that wind and solar are such such alternatives.

Drakvag – you really should catch up on your reading and understanding of how the windmills of our time is financed. And yes, I’m also from Sweden.

Drakvag says:
August 6, 2012 at 6:23 am

There are only 92 (I think) water power plants in Sweden and the majority of those are found in the north situated on the large rivers, so what you say isn’t true at all. Here you have a list of the energy producing municipalities (2011) in order of produced effect. Numbers are number of plants.
Gotland, 181,4 MW, 177 st
Strömsund, 121,4 MW, 62 st
Malmö 114,4 MW, 50 st
Åsele 89,4 MW, 46 st
Dorotea, 68,0 MW, 34 st
Laholm, 66,4 MW, 63 st
Eslöv, 62,0 MW, 47 st
Mjölby, 61,9 MW, 60 st
Piteå, 60,3 MW, 28 st
Falkenberg, 59,3 MW, 48 st
Borgholm, 57,1 MW, 39 st
Vara, 56,4 MW, 43 st
Mellerud, 55,9 MW, 41 st
Malå, 52,6 MW, 27 st
Dals-Ed, 48,3 MW, 21 st
Nordmaling, 46,7 MW, 21 st
Tanum, 45,6 MW, 37 st
Falköping, 43,5 MW, 41 st
Krokom 42,7 MW, 21 st
Mönsterås, 41,4 MW, 20 st

Addendum to my previous post. The energy comes from wind turbines only and the numbers are the amount of wind turbines.

Drakvag, you should do your home work before calling other peoples’ work bullshit.
You probably live in Sweden, where almost half of all electricity is produced with hydro and where less than 10% is generated using fossil fuels. There are few countries in the whole world, where the situation is that good. In Sweden you can basically build wind energy as much as you want and use hydro as backup.
However, even in Sweden it’s not economically viable. According to a report written by PWC (SKGS Vad kostar kraften?” April 29th 2010), wind energy in Sweden costs 65% more than hydro and 50% more than nuclear power. There’s no point in building more expensive wind power and pollute the beautiful countryside of Sweden.

All still based on the silly nonsense that increasing CO2 is either bad or that we can/should do anything about it.

This reality of how Wind is more expensive, environmentally damaging, inefficient and actually a totally useless form of generation has been around for many many years with thousands of reports and studies to back it up. WHY then, are announcements just starting to be made by Government officials world wide that this is the case…………could it be that this massive SCAM is now in it’s final “development” stages and now all the “scammers” (politicians) are trying to get “ahead of the claims” that will be made that they are “guilty of a criminal conspiracy” bigger than anything ever pulled on modern society?

A local town just got the bill for replacing a defective gear box – $500,000. After only a few years of operation, they had “saved” less than a tenth that in electricity costs. And they’re not the only ones to discover this problem. Taking down the windmill will cost a huge amount as well.

Here in Sweden the costs for wind energy is very low, as most of the wind power plants are built besides, or very close to, where we already have water power plants.

However, for the other 90+% of the world that has little or no hydropower, it’s a completely different analysis.
In case you hadn’t noticed, this study was out of the UK.

The European record shows that off-shore wind costs in excess of 20-cents (U.S.) per Kwh, at the fence and for the life of the plant. That same record shows central, photovoltaic solar at 40-cents. To both those figures, you can add 8-cents for transmission and distribution fixed costs.
The current U.S. residential electric utility bill averages about 12-cents per Kwh. Of that total, 4-cents is the cost of wholesale electric power at the trading hubs. Do the numbers.

I will provide a very simple reason why an uncontrollable power generating source is more expensive than its supporters might claim. This applies to ANY uncontrollable power source, not
just wind. As the magnitude of those uncontrollable inputs to the grid grow beyond trivial amounts,
there must exist 100% backup for their power, which comes only from controllable sources. As these uncontrollable sources feed power, it means a conventional plant whose power is being displaced by that uncontrollable power, must produce less power. While proponents of the uncontrollable power technology will point out that fuel is saved, it is also true that power produced by the conventional plants now becomes more expensive, since it has suffered a loss in capacity. This is due to the fact that fuel costs are but part of the costs of operating those displaced plants. In the case of a nuclear plant, barely 10% of its operating costs are from the uranium fuel that it uses. In effect, your operating expenses have almost doubled, but are producing, and selling, the same amount of power. Regardless of the amount of power supplied by uncontrollable sources, it is unlikely that you could ever close down one single controllable power source (conventional plant), since that uncontrollable power can completely disappear. For solar,even if you could guarantee sun every day (perhaps in a desert), that sun only shines and produces appreciable power for 9 or 10 hours or so out of every 24. In non-desert locales, entire days or even weeks can go by without appreciable solar radiation.

I encountered a pumped storage facility on a bike ride up Guanella Pass out of Georgetown, Colorado. (39°39’19″N 105°42’30″W) It is called the Cabin Creek Generation Station, built in 1964-1967.

Power Production Capabilities: Cabin Creek has two units, each with a nameplate capacity of 162 megawatts (MW).
Cabin Creek has the ability to respond to increases in customer demand quicker than any other plant on our [Xcel] system.
Fuel Source: Water supplied from two reservoirs totaling 1,977acre feet, enough for full-load operation of both units for four hours.

Google Earth shows the upper reservoir at 11,235 ft, with the lower reservoir at 9974 ft.
The link to “Do the Math” supplied by commieBob @ 7:36 am is a good one to show the scale of the issue.

For example, to get the amount of energy stored in a single AA battery, we would have to lift 100 kg (220 lb) 10 m (33 ft) to match it. To match the energy contained in a gallon of gasoline, we would have to lift 13 tons of water (3500 gallons) one kilometer high (3,280 feet).

Martin Lack says:
“Doesn’t change the fact that fossil fuels will run out one day and/or that burning them is damaging our environment. When you know you’re in a hole it is wise to stop digging.”
Doesn’t it take fossil fuel energy to manufacture and install wind turbines to begin with Martin? In addition, the raw materials extracted from the earth that are needed to make wind turbine components are finite as well, aren’t they?. The rare earth element neodymium immediately comes to mind—and it is quite polluting and destructive to mine them from the Earth. And finally, wind turbines (along with solar panels) leave us with toxic waste that requires disposal at the end of their useful lives. The last I heard, there was no system in place to dispose of that waste—although I could be wrong about that now. Guess we need to stop digging out the raw materials for wind turbines as well, huh?
There never seems to be any end to the number of wind power supporters who are unaware of all
of all of the environmental and other shortcomings that wind turbines suffer from. I just shake my head in dispair whenever I hear from another one.

Here in the US the fact that these windmills are chopping up birds, including raptors, may be our best defense against the expansion of these economic boondogles given the extreme “environmental” indoctrination that has been laid upon the population by the leftist media and educational system.

The Danish Wind Industry has the longest experience record on wind turbines.
Their data shows that CO2 emissions actually increased as a result of leading the charge on using wind power to generate electricity.
But why let facts alter your belief in wind power as an alternative energy. Trust the religion, not the engineering.

yeppers, Wind Energy is so expensive that TXU Energy is giving it away for free from 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM.
Jes don’ know how we can afford it.

Tell that to the TXU Energy customers.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — During the early morning hours of April 15, with a steady breeze blowing down Colorado’s Front Range, the state’s biggest utility set a U.S. record — nearly 57% of the electricity being generated was coming from wind power.
As dawn came and the 1.4 million customers in Xcel Energy’s service district began turning on the lights, toasters and other appliances, the utility’s coal and natural gas-fired power plants ramped up production and brought wind’s contribution back closer to its 2012 average of 17%
http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/06/news/economy/wind-power-Colorado/index.htm?iid=HP_LN

Alan Watt, Climate Denialist Level 7 says:
August 6, 2012 at 10:50 am
Among the current darlings of the “clean renewable” crowd we have wind and solar. Both are unreliable in the sense they cannot be made to produce power on demand. Solar is at least reliably unreliable — that is for any given location and date you can calculate the maximum possible output, and know that you will get something less than that. And every day has at least some sunlight. Wind on the other hand is unreliably unreliable, as we can’t even predict a baseline. Wind can go to zero and stay there for days, or get so strong the turbines must be feathered to protect them from damage.
In addition to its “power when the Gods smile” property, wind has the additional problem that the energy density simply isn’t there. If it were, we would still be moving passengers and cargo by sailing ships. We gave that up roughly 150 years ago when fossil fuel efficiency was much lower that we can achieve today. In the same 150 years the wind hasn’t gotten any stronger or steadier.
The best use of solar energy is to grow plants and then eat them. Or feed them to animals and eat the animals. Or grow trees and harvest them for attractive wood so the Gibson company can make nice pretty guitars, which folk-singers can use to protest how capitalism is destroying the world.
*
Alan? You have a way with words. You are soooo right. And I got a good chuckle out of your last paragraph. Perfection! 🙂

Not to mention the unbelievably high level of infrasonic pollution emanating from industrial wind farms. Energy is highest below 0.1 Hz, in the microbarom range. Those waves, due to extremely low attenuation, can propagate thousands of kilometers in the atmosphere, so pollution, if the technology is promoted further, is not even local. It is most definitely a global threat.
For this frequency range, although it has detrimental health effects, there is no regulation in place anywhere. One can’t even measure them using microphones (even the best ones have a sharp cutoff below 1 Hz). For this purpose special devices, microbarometers are needed (used to check compliance to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty).

The UK’s “John Muir Trust” an environmental outfit, used Stuart Young consulting to do an analysis on wind power in the UK.
The Report; ” Analysis of UK Wind Power Generation; Nov 2008 to Dec 2010″ was released in Mar 2011.
http://www.jmt.org/assets/pdf/Report_Analysis%20UK%20Wind_SYoung.pdf
The summary of the report is devastating to wind power but seems to have been totally ignored by everybody, no doubt deliberately so ,as the wind power industry scammers grabbed for every tax payer dollar they could scam out of the bleeding public with the straight out connivance of a corrupt political system.
The report’s findings were completely contrary to the UK’s political and media “progressive’ meme of only a year or so ago.
How times change and we are only seeing the tip of the changes as yet that are about to overturn the old order of the last two thirds of a century and usher in a new order, the likes of which we cannot yet envisage.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
PRINCIPAL FINDINGS
in respect of analysis of electricity generation from all the U.K. windfarms which are metered by National Grid,
November 2008 to December 2010
The following five statements are common assertions made by both the wind industry and Government representatives and agencies. This Report examines those assertions.
1. “Wind turbines will generate on average 30% of their rated capacity over a year.”
2. “The wind is always blowing somewhere.”
3. “Periods of widespread low wind are infrequent.”
4. “The probability of very low wind output coinciding with peak electricity demand is slight.”
5. “Pumped storage hydro can fill the generation gap during prolonged low wind periods.”
This analysis uses publicly available data for a 26 month period between November 2008 and December 2010 and the facts in respect of the above assertions are:
1. Average output from wind was 27.18% of metered capacity in 2009, 21.14% in 2010, and 24.08% between November 2008 and December 2010 inclusive.
2. There were 124 separate occasions from November 2008 till December 2010 when total generation from the windfarms metered by National Grid was less than 20MW. (Average capacity over the period was in excess of 1600MW).
3. The average frequency and duration of a low wind event of 20MW or less between November 2008 and December 2010 was once every 6.38 days for a period of 4.93 hours.
4. At each of the four highest peak demands of 2010 wind output was low being respectively 4.72%, 5.51%, 2.59% and 2.51% of capacity at peak demand.
5. The entire pumped storage hydro capacity in the UK can provide up to 2788MW for only 5 hours then it drops to 1060MW, and finally runs out of water after 22 hours.
OTHER FINDINGS
have emerged in the course of this analysis in addition to the Principal Findings which related to the testing of five common assertions. These Other Findings are listed below.
1. During the study period, wind generation was:
• below 20% of capacity more than half the time.
• below 10% of capacity over one third of the time.
• below 2.5% capacity for the equivalent of one day in twelve.
• below 1.25% capacity for the equivalent of just under one day a month.
The discovery that for one third of the time wind output was less than 10% of capacity, and
often significantly less than 10%, was an unexpected result of the analysis.
2. Among the 124 days on which generation fell below 20MW were 51 days when generation was 10MW or less. In some ways this is an unimportant statistic because with 20MW or less output the contribution from wind is effectively zero, and a few MW less is neither here nor there. But the very existence of these events and their frequency – on average almost once every 15 days for a period of 4.35 hours – indicates that a major reassessment of the capacity credit of wind power is required.
3. Very low wind events are not confined to periods of high pressure in winter. They can occur at any time of the year.
4. The incidence of high wind and low demand can occur at any time of year. As connected wind capacity increases there will come a point when no more thermal plant can be constrained off to accommodate wind power. In the illustrated 30GW connected wind capacity model with
“must-run” thermal generation assumed to be 10GW, this scenario occurs 78 times, or 3 times a month on average. This indicates the requirement for a major reassessment of how much wind capacity can be tolerated by the Grid.
5. The frequency of changes in output of 100MW or more over a five minute period was
surprising. There is more work to be done to determine a pattern, but during March 2011,
immediately prior to publication of this report, there were six instances of a five minute rise in
output in excess of 100MW, the highest being 166MW, and five instances of a five minute drop
in output in excess of 100MW, the highest being 148MW. This indicates the requirement for a
re-assessment of the potential for increased wind capacity to simulate the instantaneous loss (or gain) of a large thermal plant.
6. The volatility of wind was underlined in the closing days of March 2011 as this Report was
being finalised.
• At 3.00am on Monday 28th March, the entire output from 3226MW capacity was 9MW.
• At 11.40am on Thursday 31st March, wind output was 2618MW, the highest recorded to
date.
• The average output from wind in March 2011 was 22.04%.
• Output from wind in March 2011 was 10% of capacity or less for 30.78% of the time.
The nature of wind output has been obscured by reliance on “average output” figures. Analysis
of hard data from National Grid shows that wind behaves in a quite different manner from that
suggested by study of average output derived from the Renewable Obligation Certificates
(ROCs) record, or from wind speed records which in themselves are averaged.
It is clear from this analysis that wind cannot be relied upon to provide any significant level of
generation at any defined time in the future. There is an urgent need to re-evaluate the
implications of reliance on wind for any significant proportion of our energy requirement.

Ah, bollocks; the California ISO chart looks just like this, day after day. About 12% of Demand from Renewables.
http://content.caiso.com/green/renewrpt/20120805_DailyRenewablesWatch.pdf

Kum Dollison: I have this wonderful car that costs only $500,000 but you get FREE fuel. Can I expect a check soon?

The levelized cost of wind is right down there with coal, now. Give it a couple of years of increasesin the price of coal, and tell me what you think.

Know nukes!

Smokey says:
August 7, 2012 at 11:23 am
Disko Troop,
You make clear the stark distinction between ‘environmentalists…
______________________
Actually it is not nearly that cut and dried. There are a lot of my friends on the left who are ‘conservationists’ (much better term) and are not swallowing the koolaid in huge gulps. There are also a lot of conservatives as you said. However both groups have large numbers of the wilfully blind.
I prefer the groupings:
The Regulating Class The funders of Astroturf aka NGOs.
The ‘Innocents’ Clubs The blind rank and file followers who join the Astroturf organizations thinking they are something entirely different than what they really are.
Those who realize: You are a slave
That is why we here at WUWT should not play into the hands of the ‘Puppet Masters’ and divide ourselves and fight ourselves at their direction. The main purpose of the MSM aside from reporting propaganda is to keep the “Left” and the “Right” rank and file fighting. Actually they elite will use what ever comes to had for controlling people. Right now it is their brand of ‘Socialism’ before that was ‘conservatives’ and the MSM rally cry rah rah the USA, lets fight a war.

The necessary investment for this Wind scenario would amount to about £124 billion. The same electricity demand could be met from 21.5 GW of combined cycle gas plants with a capital cost of £13 billion – the latter option is cheaper by an order of magnitude.
Yes the cost of proposed off shore wind in the UK deserves scrutiny and criticism. But c’mon, that does not at the same time grant natural gas proposals leave to happy talk. That cost of that 21 GW fleet of gas power plants does end after the capital is spent! Gas in the UK is not cheap, as they pay nearly three times what the US pays, almost $8/mmbtu wholesale. Running 21 GWe of gas power CC 24/7 would likely burn 1.2 billion mmbtu per year, or another £6-7 billion in gas costs every year, IF the price of gas holds in Europe.

Cold Fusion or LENR has been discovered by Fleishmann and Pons at the university of Utah back in 1989.
Plasma physicists have sabotaged the discovery.
In Italy they continued to do the research and Rossi found that instead of Paladium and Deuterium one could use Nickel and Hydrogen Now the US Navy is already using his e-cats. See http://www.e-catworld.com/
US media continue to ignore the revolution.
Corporate US has this week a conference in Austin, the world conference on cold fusion is in two weeks in Korea and in the beginning of September, e-cats are the subject of a convention in Zurich.
Windmills were never efficient and now with LENR are going to become completely obsolete.

Two things to say….
It’s pointless to compare the cost of wind energy to gas, coal, nuclear etc because it’s a comparison of apples to oranges. If I want to take a guaranteed delivery of 500 MW for say 24 straight hours say next Tuesday morning at 7 am, then no one who generates power via solar or wind could bid on that contract. If a wind generator did want to bid on that contract, they would have to team up with a full capacity gas generator…hence a more realistic apples to apples comparison of sources who can actually deliver the goods. Since natural gas would appear to be the ‘supplement of choice’ for those geographical locations considering wind, the proper comparison would be to take wind as supplemented by open loop gas (say 40% peak efficiency) against combined cycle gas (say 60% peak efficiency). Why the lower efficiency gas teamed with wind? It’s because wind fluctuates so quickly that the much higher efficiency combined cycle gas can’t be used. And what one quickly finds out is that if the full comparison was made of the tandem of wind and open loop gas against combined cycle gas, just about the same amount of gas is used for an equivalent amount of delivered electrical power and energy . This makes the wind component absolutely useless as a power source. The document from Professor Hughes or the information on MasterResource by Kent Hawkins is very interesting to read in this regard.
The second thing is that all the constant fluctuations associated with wind are hard on power plant operations and a system that has to accommodate them will have far more maintenance and reliability issues to deal with. Think about what causes fatigue.
All in all, wind is an absolute loser.

Very interesting post. I do agree with you that wind energy is extraordinarily expensive and inefficient. Thanks Anthony

Reality check says:
August 7, 2012 at 4:01 pm
“E-cat returns. I’m surprised it took so long to make this blog. Humans are just hardwired to believe in fairy tales, I guess. However, as noted in my own writings, the US government bought into the fantasy about “free wind and solar” so I suppose a lot of internet readers buying into cold fusion and conspiracy theories is not surprising.”
It has nothing to do with conspiracy. Your false analogy sounds like the warmists equating climate skepticism with believing that the Earth is flat.
Watch this and explain to me how these guys got everything they did wrong, I dare ya.
The SPAWAR guys:
Frank E Gordon
Twenty-Year History of Lattice-Enabled Nuclear Reactions (LENR) – Hiding in Plain Sight
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VymhJCcNBBc